My new e-book on my notions of dog training “Listening To Dogs: How To Be Your Own Training Guru” was published last week and has sparked a lot of discussion online and off about the state of dog training in America. It is an empowerment book, meant to encourage people to be their own guru. Last week, in several of the Facebook forums about the book, there were intense and revealing discussions about Cesar Milan, the country’s most popular and influential dog trainer and expert.
The topics on Cesar Milan were explosive. Hundreds of people praised his clarity and firm notions of leadership and authority. Hundreds accused him of being abusive, many called him evil. The debates and discussions raged all week, veering from the angry to the illuminating. This week, in part because of these discussions, I was re-reading the moral philosopher Hannah Arendt’s groundbreaking work on evil, “Eichmann In Jerusalem,” in which Arendt offered the then controversial theory that the architect of the “Final Solution,” one of the great evils in human history was a banal man, a bureaucrat, not especially thoughtful or powerful. His horrible crimes, she wrote, did not stem from anti-semitism alone, but from a moral vacuity, he was simply a bus driver doing what he was told.
I thought it was a striking example of the Pollution Of Outrage that has infected our ethics in so many areas, politics and the animal world come most readily to mind. Using the same term to describe Adolph Eichmann and Cesar Milan spoke to me of the utter loss of perspective afflicting the animal world, making true conversation and the exchange of ideas almost impossible. This is why I train my dogs myself, away from gurus and theorists. Training is personal, not ideological for me. In the scheme of things, Milan doesn’t cut it as a figure of evil. He’s a dog trainer with lots of ideas.
On Facebook one angry poster chastised me for failing to acknowledge the evil in Cesar Milan’s pack leader approach to training – he sometimes corrects aggressive dogs in the same way dogs do, but puffing himself up, growing and glowering, a common practice among experienced pack theory trainers and dominant dogs. Milan, I said, is no more abusive than any canine mother teaching her puppies how to behave. It’s not a training approach for me, but it seems to work for him and his dogs. Good luck to him, he sells more books than I do, he has a message people want to hear.
I asked the messager, who was become increasingly angry at my unwillingness to call Milan abusive or evil, if it was possible that Milan was simply wrong, rather than evil or abusive. Was it possible, I asked, to disagree with him but still respect him and assume he was a person of good faith? The dictionary says that abuse means the intent to treat in a “harmful, injurious, or offensive way…”
I don’t know Milan, but I do know people who do and I have read some of his books. He is an entertainer for sure, but he also seems to me to be someone who cares about dogs and loves them. I have seen or read nothing to even suggest the true meaning of abuse in his work, that is a premeditated desire to harm and injure them. And why would he do that?
Like anyone who writes authentically about dogs, I have also been targeted by people who find me cruel, abusive, even murderous in my life with dogs and other animals. My decision to euthanize my border collie “Orson” after he bit three people brought me into this black-and-white world of outrage. Many people believe they loved Orson more than me and there are whole mailing lists and websites devoted to my evilness. Perhaps that experience is what taught me to be wary of people who sling terms like abuse and evil around. Hannah Arendt reminds us to consider what true evil really and what true evil really does.
Perhaps, I asked my angry friend on Facebook, we could simply disagree about Cesar and leave it there. She seemed mystified at that, as if there were no point to disagreeing if you couldn’t feel that the person you were disagreeing with wasn’t a demon, but was just wrong. Does this remind one of Washington, the poisoned capital?
“Listening To Dogs” is the other path, the inward path. Listening to yourself, making your own decisions, respecting yourself, not the loud and angry voices of the outward world. Angry people cannot possible have healthy and grounded dogs, anger is not compatible with the sensibilities of the animal world. Whenever an angry person uses animals to attack people, or to say there is only one way to deal with animal, I think of their poor dog, struggling to get by in such a hostile cloud. Dogs can fake it for almost anyone, but they read anger like the best MRI machine. Anger is just as coercive as any Milan training approach. An angry person cannot possible train a dog happily and well. Dogma stifles innovation and creativity, it kills sensitivity as there is no reason to think and learn and grow. Or listen.
I make my living in part from my curiosity about animals, my eagerness to learn about them and listen to them. I have been wrong so many times it breaks my own heart, let along that of others. If being wrong is evil, get off of this website and run for your lives, because you are in the presence of Satan himself.
That, of course, is how I learn, how anybody learns. Intelligent people listen, they rarely judge. Intelligence is humility, not arrogance, an open mind, not a closed one. How can anyone say what everyone else should do? Not me, Dear Lord, not me.
Whenever anybody tosses the term evil around, I think of the bureaucrat Eichmann, carrying out his monstrous orders. And I remember always to think of perspective, not righteousness.